Constructing a dual language policy in a new immigrant community: Conflicts, contexts, and kids

We are currently experiencing the second greatest "wave" of immigration in U.S. history: almost 25% of U.S. students have at least one immigrant parent. This dissertation analyzes the development of educational policy designed for these "new immigrants," especially how they themselves make sense of bilingual policies and their implementation.; This work is a longitudinal case study of the construction of a bilingual, two-way immersion (TWI) policy in one suburban/urban school district. Methods included four years of participant observation with immigrant families from Mexico, interviews with policymakers, and analyses of TWI-focused public meetings and reports. Using an interdisciplinary framework from political science, social psychology, and the study of childhoods, I have extended theories of policy implementation in the interpretive/sense-making tradition.; I detail three central findings. In an analysis of the public debate, I found that immigrant voices were mostly absent, but English-dominant parents used their ideas of "what Hispanics want" to persuade policymakers to implement TWI outside of their "community." In an analysis focused on immigrants' sense-making, I found that elder children directly and indirectly shaped families' decisions to enroll younger children in TWI. In my final analysis, I demonstrate that parents' views of the developing TWI policy reflected the broad goals of such programs (bilingualism), while children's views reflected their school experiences (privileging English).; I have extended our understanding of the policy implementation process with these foci on the public and developmental nature of such processes. That is, I have explored how policy implementation "develops" a policy; and how "development" within the family shapes how clients understand and, in turn, shape policy. In sum, in each chapter, respectively, I argue that (1) policy implementation is a value-laden, longitudinal process in which public arguments may re-shape the definition of the policy itself; (2) families' developmental stages matter for how they approach educational policy; and (3) for parents and children, educational policy is a set of variable, personal meanings derived from their differing development and experiences. I conclude this dissertation with new directions for theories of policy implementation and ideas for improving the realization of novel bilingual policies in particular.